


Django Unchained

by MarkWShulkin



Category: revew of Django Unchained
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 04:35:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3161432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkWShulkin/pseuds/MarkWShulkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pre-Civil War Spaghetti Western reviewed</p>
            </blockquote>





	Django Unchained

DJANGO UNCHAINED

By Mark Shulkin

In pre-Civil War 1858, a bounty hunter/dentist named Dr. King Schultz (Christopher Waltz) seeks out a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) and buys him because he needs a sidekick to find some men he is looking for. After finding them, Django wants to find his wife, Broomhilda, (Kerry Washington) who along with him was sold by their former owner for trying to escape. Schultz offers to help Django if Django will choose to stay with him. Eventually they find Broomhilda and after a great deal of violence in which Django’s fearlessness and skill with a pistol defeats her greedy slaveholder (Leonardo Di Caprio) and frees her.

It was a Spaghetti Western originally made in Italy by Sergio Corbucci while its American version, released December 25, 2012, was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino who won an Academy Award for its story and directing. I saw it on Showtime and strongly recommend it..

Just as all Italian American names invariably end in vowels, Spaghetti Westerns are a unique variation of the American Western’s format that a cowboy rides into town with a somewhat flawed sidekick (like the Lone Ranger and Tonto) to find that the landlord is abusing the tenant’s daughter and after a losing battle with the bad guy, the cowboy is saved by his sidekick. Then it always ends with the cowboy riding off into the west without the daughter (who loves him), preferring to search for another wrong to right. That’s an example of the “Hero’s Journey”, Joseph Campbell’s term for “the calling, the search, the crisis, and the resolution of the crisis with either a happy ending or a reasonable ending , which is common to all stories, legends and myths. (Have you noticed that all musicals end with marriage?)

Instead of taming the Wild West, the European culture produces a less moralistic and less puritanical version of the Hero’s Journey that patterns itself after classical literature (Shakespeare for example) emphasizing the character’s search for enlightenment and the integration of common human emotions such as revenge, instinctual sadism, greed and racism, as happens in this film. 

Movies like this one normalize heroes being African American just as Sidney Portier did in Raisin in the Sun (1961) and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and others that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. Such movies prepared America for the election of President Obama (2008) just as Dustin Hoffman did preparing us for the Women’s Movement in Kramer vs Kramer (1979) and Tootsie (1982). Good movies like this on are a metaphor for the  
hero’s journey that all of are on as we try to heal the social ills that surround us (2015).


End file.
